When deciding whether to visit a merchant, a customer often relies on reviews from previous customers of a merchant. Typically, a customer visits a review website and/or utilizes a software solution to search for goods or services and reads reviews associated with particular merchants. In some instances, these websites may also rank the merchants using previous customer reviews.
However, solutions relying on customer reviews are problematic. Customer reviews are subjective, based on the customers' feelings towards the merchant. Subjective reviews are problematic because users often rate and judge merchants on individualistic scales, which are hard to compare (e.g., one user's four-star review may be equivalent to another user's three-star review). Subjective customer reviews may also lead to inaccurate overall reviews for a merchant or affect the merchant's rankings. Customers who feel negatively towards a merchant may be more motivated to provide a review than customers who feel positively towards a merchant.
In addition, the customer reviews are often stale. A customer does not have the option to distinguish between an old review and a new review. Thus, merchants may be ranked unfairly. Moreover, these software solutions often do not have the ability to acquire customer reviews in real-time. And, even if these software solutions do attempt to acquire the customer reviews in real-time, customers often do not provide a review because they are preoccupied. But, even further, if these software solutions do acquire the customer reviews in real-time, they often acquire customer reviews that are inconsistent with a customer's actual experience with the merchant because the customer is usually engaged with the merchant and/or other activities when providing the review in real-time.
In view of these and other shortcomings and problems with existing systems, improved systems and techniques for managing electronic tip data to provide reviews are desirable.